


The Mountains

by aghamora



Category: How to Get Away with Murder
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Bipolar Disorder, Depression, F/M, Heavy Angst, Mental Health Issues, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-07
Updated: 2017-03-09
Packaged: 2018-09-30 04:29:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10153676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aghamora/pseuds/aghamora
Summary: "This isn’t a good day. Nor is it a bad day.This is just a day. And the days like this are the ones that count."Or, Laurel becomes her mother. This is how they move forward, together.





	1. Part I

**Author's Note:**

> So the mentions of Laurel’s mother’s struggles with mental illness in the show have intrigued me, and they were largely what prompted this fic. Her particular illness is never mentioned, but Karla said in an interview she suffers from bipolar disorder, and it made me wonder about the possibility that Laurel might inherit that from her/experience it too, especially given all the stress in her life after the fire, etc. 
> 
> This isn’t particularly meant to be a happy or shippy fic; I just wanted to explore how Frank and Laurel would respond, realistically, to a situation like this. It’s more a character study, if you will. The particular timeline for this is sort of murky; it’s after Wes’s death but sans any pregnancy, just because I didn’t feel like covering that in this fic. It deals slightly with the aftermath of 3x15, but not a ton.
> 
> The title comes from the song 'I Miss the Mountains' from the musical Next to Normal, which deals with mental health issues and specifically bipolar disorder. It also refers to a sustained metaphor throughout the fic; the mountains being the euphoric highs those with bipolar experience. This has one more part after this which will (hopefully) be up soon.

There are days that come as warnings.

It’s December, close to Christmas, a month or so after the fire, and he awakens one night from what might have been a dream, but what might also have been a nightmare. He doesn’t know; all Frank knows is that he wakes with a start, feeling around on the couch beneath him, his fingers grappling for purchase on something to tether him to earth, fear cutting through his blood like a million tiny icicles. It feels as though something has awoken him – though nothing has, not that he can tell. His eyes dart around Laurel’s living room, and everything is a flat, fuzzy shade of grey. It must be late, close to five AM, in that period of time just before the threat of dawn.

It feels as though something has woken him, and when he glances down the hall and sees a light on in Laurel’s bedroom, he frowns.

It’s a tacit, shaky understanding, the one they’ve come to, this cohabitation born of necessity. This truce, if you will. He’d had nowhere to go; Laurel had offered him a place, and he’s still not entirely sure why. He may never know. What he does know, right then, is that something is wrong; something is out of place in the fabric of their universe, and so he goes for the door like a Wiseman following a star, entirely unsure what he expects to find.

His eyes fly straight to it when he steps inside.

A wall. Her entire wall is covered with papers: newspaper articles, printouts, pictures. A map or two with markings of red pen on them. Most about the Mahoney’s, as far as he can tell, but some about her father, his businesses; a charming portrait next to an article about his company's latest acquisition. It’s haphazardly arranged with no real rhyme or reason, as far as he can tell, but when he catches sight of Laurel standing in front of it, hands on her hips, he thinks maybe she has her own definition of rhyme and reason; a method to this madness. She’s just staring at it, unblinking, now and then bringing one of her hands up to gnaw at her fingernails. Her eyes are red. Wild.

She doesn’t hear him approach until he finally clears his throat, musters up his voice. “Hey.”

Laurel tears her eyes from the wall, giving him a cursory glance; only long enough to acknowledge him before looking away, fidgeting, shifting her weight from leg to leg. She looks ill at ease, flustered. Like she can't stand still.

“Hey.”

Something is off. He feels like a hunter approaching a feral animal, not sure whether he’ll be bitten, ravaged, get his damn arm torn off, but Laurel seems calm enough, too captivated by whatever it is she’s doing to give any of those possibilities much consideration. Her eyes scan up and down then flit around wildly, taking in the information as if holds some answer, some guidance, like decoding ancient hieroglyphics.

He doesn’t have to ask to know she’s been up all night doing this – whatever _this_ is. But he does anyway; he has the sense he needs to talk to her, bring her back down to earth. Back down to him.

“You been up all night?”

She sighs, brings her hand up to her mouth and starts to gnaw at a hangnail on her thumb; a new habit, he thinks. “Yeah.”

Something is off. He doesn’t know what to do, how to behave around her; if making one wrong move will set off a landmine, set _her_ off.

Finally, Frank just settles on asking, “What’s, uh… what is all this?”

“The Mahoney’s and my dad,” she explains, vaguely. “There’s some connection. I know there is.”

She’s been on this for weeks, a dog with a bone. She’s let him in on most of it; the reappearance of an old family friend after the fire. Her father. Her father and the Mahoney’s. She thinks they killed Wes; one or maybe both of them. He doesn’t understand the story, not fully, but he’s helped her when he can, however he can. He knows she wants answers.

This is different. This isn’t like anything she’s ever done before.

Frank rubs the sleep out of his eyes. “This can’t wait ‘til tomorrow?”

“I’m not tired,” is all he gets, and she doesn’t seem to be; she looks violently awake, almost painfully conscious, like her eyelids have been pinned back to keep her even from blinking.

He can tell there’s no reasoning with her, not when she’s like this, in this bizarre, trance-like state, but he tries, regardless, like a stubborn son of a bitch he is.

“You gotta go to bed, you been at this for – what? Eight hours?”

A shrug. “Don’t know.”

He reaches for her, placing a hand on her arm; however ill-advised the gesture might be. He knows, somehow, that he needs to do it, needs to shake her loose of whatever hopelessly spiraling loop her brain is caught in. She doesn’t flinch, but when she looks at him, her eyes slip out of focus, go bleary, like he’s shocked her with a jolt of static electricity.

“Hey,” he says, lowly. “You gotta get some sleep.”

“I told you,” she snaps and moves away, crossing the room and plucking a paper off of her bed, “I’m not tired. Now, either you help me, or you leave.”

It catches him off guard, the bite in her tone, the way each syllable hits him in a way that feels almost physical, like pins in his chest. She sharpens her words like knives as they leave her mouth, and that’s been a far from rare occurrence since the fire, her snappishness, her anger, but this is different. Much different. She looks almost deranged, like a robot with one singular command in its brain, unable to even entertain the thought of doing anything else, feeling any other emotion besides the one it was programmed to feel. One that doesn’t need to sleep or eat or even really breathe.

Frank barely remembers how to breathe either, right then.

“I’ll, uh,” he manages, stepping back as she turns away, turning back to her work, dismissing him silently. “I’ll make breakfast.”

Laurel doesn’t so much as nod. He leaves her like that, head and heart heavy.

 

~

 

There are the early days.

January. The family friend is dead now. It was a shitstorm that ended with a gunshot, a squeeze of Laurel’s dainty finger, and Frank cleans up her mess, because Frank is very good at cleaning up her messes. She’s been quieter, since, and she was always the quiet one, but this is markedly different.

Very much darker.

They can heal. They can move on, now – if _moving on_ is really possible in any conventional sense – but she seems to have no interest in that; no interest in anything, really. She withdraws into herself, spends the weeks over Christmas break lying in bed, barely moving or eating and only infrequently giving him any indication she's still alive. She functions, but only at the barest minimum possible, ignoring him most days, like he isn’t there at all. It’s a helpless feeling, watching her waste away, wither. Wilt like a flower on the vine. She seems almost to be mummified by the bed sheets, lying there and waiting for the hand of death to come.

He consults the others for help. Michaela, mostly, but Michaela is just about as fucking clueless as he is, and just as useless. She doesn’t know what to do – possibly even less than he does.

He comes to her on New Year’s Day, padding across the carpet into her bedroom as silently as he can manage. She’s rolled over on her side facing away from him; all he can see beneath the blankets is the sharp jut of her shoulder blades, which only seems to grow sharper by the day, more pronounced. He has one horrifying flicker of a moment when he’s certain that he can’t see her breathing at all, that she’s expired, that her body has finally granted her the release of death she longs for – but he quells his panic and looks closer, and sure enough she’s still breathing, the comforter rising and falling with each reluctant inhale and exhale.

Still breathing. He’s still breathing, too.

Now he just needs to figure out how to keep it that way.

“Hey,” he says softly, approaching the bed. He doesn’t dare to take a seat; he has the sense that wouldn’t go over well. They may be all but living together, but he knows he has to keep his distance. “Happy New Year.”

It sounds stupid. He feels stupid, feels dumb and awkward and lumbering, and he doesn’t know what to say. He feels like he’s talking to a wall, and he might as well be because Laurel doesn’t turn towards him, move even an inch. He can tell she isn’t sleeping; he knows the pattern of her breathing, and it’s too fast, too unsteady. In sleep it’s longer, each pull of her lungs steadier.

“Want somethin’ to eat?” Frank continues, pressing, unwilling to back down. He can’t. For her sake. Even if she doesn’t understand. “I can make whatever you want. Or order in. Couple places might be open.”

A beat. He’s terrified she’s going to ignore him again, and if she does he’s not sure what he’ll do – but finally, Laurel shifts beneath the blankets, making a sound like a faint, irritated hum.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Haven’t eaten all day,” he tells her, finally daring to settle down next to her. “C’mon, you gotta eat, else you’re gonna-”

He stops himself quickly when he realizes what he’d been about to say, but the damage has already been done; she knows what he’d meant. Slowly, very slowly, Laurel turns over to face him, and when she does he stops breathing, the sight of her sucking all the air out of his lungs, wrenching them inward. Her eyes are a dim grey-blue, but the dullness in them seems, somehow, to bring out the greys, like the color is slowly leeching out of her irises, like the color is slowly leeching out of her entire body, and she’s fading to greyscale, all of her, bit by bit. Her hair is wild, greasy and unwashed; she’s in a tank top she hasn’t changed out of for at least two days. Her stare is level, and nausea rises up inside him all at once like a swelling wave, roiling in his gut.

She looks horrible. Horrible and beautiful and God, _God_ he wants to reach her so badly, make everything better, but he doesn’t know how. He can never hope to know.

“What? Or else I’m gonna die?” she replies, her voice hoarse from disuse. This is the first time she’s spoken to him in days, and she looks grimly amused by his words. “You ever think maybe that’s what I want?”

He can’t breathe. Can’t speak. Can’t move. “Laurel…”

“I should be dead,” she remarks, as hollow as a breathing skeleton and just as emotionless. Her eyes slip out of focus, slip away from him. “I should’ve died that night, in the fire. They should’ve just… they should’ve just left me in there. With Wes.” No emotion. She isn’t crying, isn’t angry, isn’t anything. This nothingness is worse than all of those combined, he thinks. “He’s dead because of me. It’s my fault.”

“It’s _not_ -”

“It is,” she insists, voice too soft and weak to sound very emphatic. A terrible smile makes its way onto her lips, and he doesn’t know how to describe it, only knows that it’s fucking terrible, that it makes his blood crackle into shards of ice. “I’m an awful person. I’ve been awful to everyone. You, Annalise… Bonnie. I told Connor to kill himself.” A pause. “Maybe I should take my own advice.”

“Don’t… don’t talk like that-” _Don’t talk like that. Please. I can’t handle it. It’ll kill me._

There’s a flicker of contemplation behind her eyes, right then. A light. A muted little spark. Her lips twist back down into a scowl, and she pulls the blankets tighter around her, a few strands of dirty hair falling in her face.

“Everything feels… black,” is all she mutters, cryptically. “I just want it to stop.”

Black. Everything feels black. It’s vague, very much so, but he understands. He knows exactly what she means, that pervasive blackness that’d overcome him, that shadow that’d hooked its claws into him the night he’d put a pistol to his chin, nearly blew his brains all over Annalise’s carpet. He’d wanted to die. Known it was right. Thought it would restore some equilibrium in the world that was thrown off by his continued existence. That’s how she feels, now.

She shouldn’t ever have to feel like that.

“We can make it stop,” he urges – although no, he can’t. He has no fucking clue how to make it stop, how to rip her from this grey fog encompassing her. He’s pleading with her, now, acutely aware of how desperate he sounds. He thinks, maybe, he sounds like Bonnie had sounded that night she’d pleaded with him, begged him to live. “Okay? I know we can. But you… you gotta eat, Laurel, please.”

“Give me one good reason,” she tells him, point-blank, eyes honed in razor sharp on him. Challenging him, to give her a good enough reason to live. Go on. Keep breathing. She seems to be half-joking, almost, in that same awful way.

He has so many. _Because I need you. Because I’ll die without you. Because I’ll go fucking insane. Because I love you._ None of them would be good enough for her; he doesn’t know what Laurel feels toward him, anymore, but he has the vague impression she probably hates him – or maybe she doesn’t give a shit about him at all. It’s probably the latter, and the fact kills him, eats him as hollow as she is, like carrion crows descending on his bones, gnawing the flesh right off with little barbed teeth.

Her apathy is a million times worse than her hatred could ever be.

“Wes would want you to,” he tells her, and it’s true; he had never known Wes well, never gotten along with the kid, but he knows how much he’d meant to Laurel, knows he wouldn’t want her destroying herself any more than he does. That’d been their sole common denominator: Laurel. “He wouldn’t… he wouldn’t want you doin’ this.”

Again, that flicker. It’s not quite a light in her eyes, but it’s something. It’s recognition. After a moment, she gives in and nods, rolling over with a huff.

“Fine.”

Fine. She’ll eat. He’d expected her to put up much more of a fight, and Frank blinks, caught off guard.

“You, uh… You want anything specific?”

“No,” is all she gives him. The single syllable rings hollow too, like the fading tone of a bell after it’s been struck. It makes him sick in a way he can’t entirely describe, sick to the point of numbness. “I don’t care.”

He nods, and he goes, and after half an hour or so he returns with burnt, rubbery pancakes from some shady twenty-four-hour diner a few streets over, the only place he could find open. He sits with her while she eats, though it’s more mechanical than anything, again almost robotic; not showing any genuine desire to taste her food, consuming it solely for the sake of the calories it contains. She’s eating because he told her to. Not for _him_ , though. For Wes.

In the end, Frank figures the reasons don’t matter. She’s eating, at least.

Small victories. He has to learn to appreciate small victories.

 

~

 

There are days that are okay.

Really, there are. She slogs her way out of that fog after a few weeks and returns to class in time for the spring semester, though it’s not as if nothing has happened in the interim and everything is how it was. Since the fire she’s been different, fundamentally, weathered and shaped by loss and grief like a stone, and now there are countless jagged edges there weren’t before, new pieces of her he’s still taking the time to learn.

They’re _both_ different, mangled beyond recognition in so many ways. But they’re learning how to fit together, again.

And things are all right, for a while. A latency period. They fall back into a rhythm, and they’re not together, maybe, not anywhere close, but Frank thinks, in all his stupid fucking optimism, that things might be getting better. He’s still sleeping on the couch. She’s still cold to him sometimes, lashing out, snapping for no reason. He stands there and takes it when she does; he never yells back, never fights with her. He stands there and takes each word willingly like a lash on his back, and when Laurel is done and she’s emptied herself of things to say and she apologizes, he accepts it. He accepts _her_ , all her grief and bitterness and anger.

He never considers leaving. Never truly considers the idea that he could exist anywhere else but by her side. It doesn’t feel possible, like he’s an ancient spirit bound to a temple, bound to this apartment. Bound to her.

“I’m sorry,” she says one night, out of the blue, after they’ve finished washing the dinner dishes together and she’s heading down the hallway, heading to bed. Laurel stops and turns, suddenly, speaks those words, and Frank perks up from his spot on the couch, unsure if he’d heard her right.

Certain he must not have.

“What do you mean?” he asks, voice scraping his throat roughly.

She looks so genuine, so simple and disarming, standing there in her sweatpants and baggy Middleton t-shirt, repentant. Normally most days her eyes are hardened steel, but now they’re melted back to that gentle, wide, liquid blue, and the light catches in her hair, makes the copper strands gleam, gilds her from head to toe. She’s beautiful, and it’s not how she looks, not some temporary state she enters in and out of from time to time; it’s something she just _is_. Something she’s never stopped being.

She deflates, pressing her lips into a line. “I don’t know. For everything. What I said at the hospital. That it should’ve been you. That was…” She shakes her head, bringing her arms up and folding them across her chest. “I didn’t mean that.”

 _I’m sorry. For what? Everything._ The words they’d exchanged that day they’d met, him and her and his lawyer, unable to say what they’d been longing so badly to say. He is sorry – for everything; it’s not something _he_ ever stops being, either. He thinks he’ll probably be perpetually sorry for the rest of his life, for everything, and now she’s here, apologizing, telling him she was wrong. She doesn’t need to. After everything, everything he’s done, she’s still let him be here, with her; not romantically maybe, not with any degree of intimacy, but the simple fact that she _has_ is so much more than enough.

“I know,” he says and crosses the room, comes to a stop before her. “It’s okay.”

“It’s not,” she insists, albeit halfheartedly. She lowers her eyes, hauls a deep breath into her lungs. “I was so… so _mad_ , after Wes. I wasn’t myself.” She looks up, her eyes settling on his, locking on, holding tight. It makes his heart seize up inside of him. “I’m sorry.”

“Just believe me,” Frank tells her, firmly. He reaches out, takes her hand. Presses a tender kiss to the back of it, and hopes, with that kiss, that somehow he can wire their brains together, make her feel everything he’s feeling, everything he feels for _her_. “When I say it’s okay. It is.” _I love you. I love you. I love you so much._

That finally coaxes a smile out of Laurel; tiny, anemic, but there all the same, the first one he’s seen in what feels like a thousand years. She’s so beautiful, so good, and so deserving of all the goodness in the world. Everything before, the blood, the pain, that hell is behind them. They can move on. They can be good, again.

She turns after a moment, making her way down the hall, disappearing, flitting about as soft and graceful as a butterfly. She doesn’t give him any indication he can follow; they’re not there yet, not quite.

He doesn’t follow. But with a thin smile on his lips, Frank watches her go.

 

~

 

There’s the first bad night.

Things are okay, but he should know better than to think that will last long, and sure enough it doesn’t. A week later, and she’s back to her anger, her bitterness, the changes in her stark, enough to make his head reel. It’s like an entirely different persona, and he’s never sure which Laurel he’ll arrive home to: smiling and content or bitter and angry or silent and sullen. Sometimes a perplexing combination of all three.

But he arrives home late one night to a new creature. One he’s never seen before.

He steps through the door into the living room, and there she is, perched on the couch with a bottle of wine next to her, a half-drained glass on the coffee table. She looks up when he answers, with an almost bestial alertness about her, like a startled doe in the forest, but the look fades when she sees it’s only him, and her eyes narrow, inexplicably, her pupils huge and dark and inky in the dim light. Something is off; she’s too stiff, too alert, again inhabiting that state of violent, brutal consciousness that seems to hit her like a train on the tracks now and then. She almost looks like she’s vibrating, the atoms and cells and molecules in her body humming, colliding against one another as if trying to escape through her skin.

“Hey,” is all he can say. And it’s all she _lets_ him say.

Because then Laurel pounces.

It doesn’t register, the flurry of movement as she crosses the room and flings herself at him, standing on her tiptoes and forcing her mouth onto his. It’s all so much at once: her familiar scent, the feeling of her lips on his, the way she hooks her arms around the back of his neck and gives a content little hum and crushes the two of them together. It’s not finessed, graceful, loving. It’s more of a collision than it is a kiss, and he stumbles backwards, mind unable to process so much at once, unable to think of anything besides the fact that Laurel is kissing him, kissing him like a bird of prey descending on her next victim.

Kissing him like she’s starving, and he’s all that can save her, and she’s going to eat him alive.

He’s too stunned to kiss back. He tenses, lips cold, motionless as a corpse beneath hers. Not pulling her closer, not pushing her way. Not doing anything. She hasn’t kissed him in so long the feeling of her lips on his paralyzes him, turns him into some brainless hunk of flesh that can’t remember how to move. It feels like it unplugs his brain from the rest of his body entirely. Shoots a bullet through it and destroys the last few remaining rational places there.

“You’re home,” she pants, reaching up, cupping his cheeks, feeling the newly-grown patches of his beard beneath her fingertips. She looks jubilant, almost celebratory. “I waited up.”

He blinks and tries, inexplicably, to wrench himself free, tug her off of him. “What’re you… Laurel, what-”

“I want you to fuck me,” she breathes, and when he pulls back to get a good look at her, all he can think is that he doesn’t recognize her. Her eyes are wild. She looks crazed. Something is off, but before he can make a mention of it, she’s kissing him again, with that same, ravenous intent to consume, eat him alive, mad as a cannibal. “I need it. I need you, please, Frank.”

“Lau-”

Pulling him. She’s pulling him toward the bedroom, and he’s too stunned to resist, too stunned to do anything except surrender, and he’s so large and she’s so comparatively tiny but she moves him with an almost superhuman strength, fisting his shirt in her palms. His mind locks up, boots down. Ceases to exist altogether. All he can do is feel, feel her kisses, her roaming hands which venture further and further south, slipping through his belt, yanking at his zipper. This is madness. This is everything he’s dreamed of for so long, everything he wants so bad. It’s all he knows, that wanting, that desire for things he can’t have – and now she’s going to give it to him. Give him herself, again. Her body.

Not like this. This isn’t her. He doesn’t know who this is, this creature, this succubus, but this isn’t _Laurel_.

He manages to pry her off just as they reach the hallway, and he places a hand on her chest, pushing her back against the wall, harder than he means to. She staggers back and hits it with a _thump_ , breathless and gaping at him, eyes suddenly glowing like furious coals through the darkness. He must be a madman, refusing her. Probably he is. He’s never been sane.

This isn’t sane, either. This is fucking _insanity_.

“Hey, stop,” he manages to sputter. “Stop, Laurel, what the _fuck_ , what-”

Not a question. A statement. What the fuck. What is she _doing_. She’s saying yes to a question he hasn’t asked. Saying she wants him.

But she _isn’t_ saying yes. She can’t say yes, like this, in this state – whatever the fuck this state even is.

“We can’t-” Frank tells her, and she’s still just watching him, vague shock on her face, which is quickly starting to mingle with flashes of anger, descending like storm clouds. It’s hard to see anything; half of the hallway is thrown into shadow, but she’s clear as a sunrise, looking, somehow, like she creates her own illumination. “We can’t do this-”

“Why?” she demands and moves forward again, fierce determination in her stride. A wicked, enticing little grin tugs at her lips. “You don’t want this?”

 _You don’t want this?_ She’d asked him that, that time in the basement, before she’d tugged off her panties and he’d bent her over a shelf and fucked her until they were both screaming, fucked her and made her watch herself come in the dirty old mirror. He’d made her scream, then; he could make her scream now too, bury himself balls-deep in her and fuck her through the mattress, and it’d be good, God, he knows it would. He wants it so bad.

He doesn’t want it at all.

“What’s… what’s goin’ on with you?” he asks, breathless, wiping his lips. “This isn’t you.”

Closer. She won’t stop moving closer until she’s pressing herself against him, and he’s hard and _fuck_ , he doesn’t want to be, not at all, but his body, his biology betrays him, and he can’t fend it off. She’s smiling, again, just barely exposing her teeth, cocking her head to one side. She looks like a temptress, like she’s Jezebel and he’s Ahab and she’s inviting him to her darkness, inviting him to her hell, luring him in with her body and blackening his soul with every kiss. He’s never seen her like this. She isn’t drunk; he knows how she is when she’s drunk, when she’s sloppy and giggly and a bit too handsy, and there’s no clumsiness about her movements, now. Every single one is precise and purposeful and planned. She knows what she’s doing.

Knows what she’s doing to _him_.

“You want this too,” she breathes, breath like steam against his neck. He shudders. He can’t pull away. She presses a kiss where her breath had landed, lips soft as silk. “You wanna fuck me. So do it. I’ll let you. You can do whatever you want.”

She’s reaching down, now, cupping him over his pants and squeezing with those delicate, tapered fingers. It should feel like pleasure, but it just feels like pain; foreign, unwelcome. It jolts him out of his semi-conscious state, and he pushes her back again, and this time it’s more of a shove because Laurel hits the wall with a cry of surprise, and it kills him, knowing he hurt her. Knowing hurting her is all he’s good for. All he can seem to do.

“Stop,” he growls, and she flinches. He reaches out, scrubbing a trembling hand across his beard and exhaling, leaning back against the wall. If it weren’t for the wall he thinks he might collapse altogether. “We’re not doin’ this. You don’t – you don’t want this.”

She looks almost affronted – but most of all, she looks furious. “What? Don’t you want me?”

“I do, I-” He cuts himself off, shaking his head. “You know I do. But you don’t. This isn’t you, Laurel, you’re not… you’re not actin’ like you.”

He’s provoked her, that much is clear. The anger locks into her eyes like a missile onto its target, and her jaw hardens; that temptress, that demoness is gone – or maybe she’s back. Back in another form entirely and out for his blood.

“ _Fuck_ you,” she spits, so harsh it makes him recoil. He’s never heard her like this, low and lethal. “What? Am I ruined for you now? After Wes? That it?”

“No,” he almost cries the word. “No, God, you know I don’t think that-”

The words fall flat, linger in the gaping chasm between them. They’re only feet apart, pressed against opposite walls in the hallway, the night descending thickly upon them, so thick it feels suffocating, like it’s climbing down his throat, filling his lungs. He can’t breathe, looking at her. Her eyes are daggers, bullets, weapons, an armory she can tear him to bits so easily with. All she has to do is look at him. For a long moment, she does just that.

Then, she’s gone.

She’s a shadow in the night, cutting through the darkness like an apparition and disappearing just as fast. One moment she’s there before him and the next she disappears, stalking away, in the general direction of the kitchen, and Frank follows, a pit forming in his stomach, chewing its way through his innards; he doesn’t know what to do but follow. When he reaches the kitchen, she’s standing by the counter, having grabbed a bottle of scotch from one of her cabinets and – presumably – taken a swig before setting it down next to her. She’s almost shapeless in the dark, formless, fading into the grey.

He’s terrified of her. _For_ her.

“Laurel?”

“It’s not worth it, anymore,” she says. “Surviving, after everything we’ve done. It’s not living. This…” She shakes her head. “It’s not a life.”

She’s right. He can’t tell her she’s wrong, not when they’re up to their knees in blood. Not when they’re all but drowning in it. Frank stands there, paralyzed, feeling useless and hopeless and not having any words to give her, any trite words of comfort, reassurances. He’s all out of those.

“And us? We’re killers,” Laurel continues, biting out a laugh. “We don’t deserve to be alive. It’d be better, if we were dead. Both of us.”

He’s about to open his mouth, say something, though he doesn’t know what, just fucking _something_ – when all at once he sees her reach out, reach over to the knife block on the counter, grasp the handle of the largest one and unsheathe it, slowly. His heart rockets into his throat like a cannonball, his limbs going numb, bloodless, and then before he knows it she’s walking towards him, at an almost leisurely pace, knife held at her side until she gets close, and he backs away, further and further until she has him pressed against the wall, so perfectly placid. Lethally rational. Calculating and cold, and he’s never seen anything so monstrous, so bone-chilling.

“Laurel… don’t-”

Knife at his chest, then, just between his ribs, right over his heart. With one move she could plunge the knife into him, end it. She’s already pierced and mangled and hacked his heart to bits a thousand times over anyway, that poor withering thing that’s only ever loved her with its every beat. It would be mercy, killing him. It would be justice, and she came to this place because she believes in justice, in doing good. This is the only good thing she can do for him, now.

Put him out of his misery like a sick dog.

“I could do it,” she remarks, and it’s almost an absentminded, disinterested observation, like she’s simply contemplating the possibility that she could but not indicating that she _will_. “I could kill you, then me. It’d all be over. Bonnie told me… you wanted to die, before. You were gonna shoot yourself.”

“Laurel… put the knife down-”

“Wouldn’t it be better?” she asks, and there are tears in her eyes now. It’s a plea. She’s begging him to agree with her, give her permission. Give her leave to do what she needs to do, for both of them. “Just ending it now? You and me?”

She wants to die. He can see it in her eyes. There’s no more fight left in her; she’s been fighting her whole life, so long. _Too_ long. She can’t fight, anymore, and she wants to die, and she wants to do it with him, here, on this night. It’d be some kind of twisted fucking Romeo and Juliet; her gutting him and then maybe slitting her own wrists, lying down to die together, letting their blood mingle in one last union of their bodies. Poetic justice.

“You don’t want that,” he manages to tell her, though he’s trembling, and he thinks it’s very, very possible she does. “You know you don’t want that, Laurel. _I_ know you don’t.”

“Or maybe… you could do it first. To me,” she continues, ignoring him, and he blinks, and now the knife is at her own throat, and she’s holding it there weakly, without much commitment, but the sight stops his heart, makes every muscle in his body seize up, like they’re all trying to collectively kill him before she can. He could handle her threatening him, killing him. He can’t handle the thought of _this_. “You could kill me. You know how to make it quick, right?”

She’s the one against the wall, now, and she takes his hands, folding them over hers so that he’s the one wielding the knife, holding it at her throat. His are shaking, shaking so goddamn bad he’s terrified he’ll cut her without meaning to, and he tries to pull away but she holds him there, and he doesn’t dare struggle, not with the blade so close to her neck, her jugular. One wrong move. One wrong move and this is over.

They’re breathing. He needs to keep them that way.

“Just do it,” she begs, eyes bleeding supplication. “Just do it, Frank, I can’t. I’m-” Her voice breaks. She’s crying now, tears catching the moonlight, making her cheeks gleam molten silver. “I can’t. You have to do it.”

His whole body is screaming. The room is screaming. These four walls and every particle contained within them are screaming, and everything around him looks distorted, twisted, like some sort of hellish surrealist painting, and he’d always known he was going to hell after he dies, but he hadn’t thought that hell could exist here on earth, here with her. She’s begging him to die, to kill her. He can’t speak. Can’t move. The quiet one. The most dangerous. That’s what she is, and he knew that all along.

He just didn’t know she was dangerous like _this_.

“You don’t even need a knife, do you?” Laurel asks, suddenly, a realization dawning on her, but she doesn’t lower the knife, doesn’t budge. There’s another terrible smile on her lips. “You could just use your hands, like you did to Lila. Strangle me.”

The words break him, burrow in his chest like a drill, hollow him out until he’s nothing but bone. There’s nothing worse she could have said to him, nothing crueler. She’s asking him to kill her, kill her like he killed Lila, with his bare hands; choke her and squeeze her throat and crush her windpipe, watch the life drain out of her eyes, feel her body go limp in his grasp. Fuck _. Fuck._

_No, God, no, no, no._

“Stop,” he rasps, cries. He barely recognizes his own voice. Barely recognizes hers. “Let me… lemme put down the knife, okay? You gotta… you gotta _stop_ , Laurel, stop it-”

He doesn’t know how it happens, who moves first. His foggy brain can’t discern if it’s her, or him, or both of them, but suddenly all he knows is blinding agony in his hand, his palm, and the stickiness of blood. He jerks the knife down, grasping the blade even though it slices into his flesh, not thinking of the consequences, only knowing that he needs to get it away from her, and he roars in pain, snarling, watching liquid red bloom in the center of his palm like a flower and drip down onto the floor where the knife now rests, harmless.

Everything enters freeze frame. The whole world stills. Frank gapes dumbly down at his injured hand, clutching the wrist, just staring at it, watching himself bleed and gritting his teeth through the pain, and she does the same. Suddenly all the hardness, all that fire and fury, floods out of her, drains from her veins right along with his blood. She exhales shakily, as if coming out of her trance, that state of madness, and looks up at him, meeting his eyes, and she’s herself, all over again, suddenly. She’s come back to herself – he can see it.

And then she’s gone, again. Before he can even say a word.

The bedroom. That’s where she goes; he hears the door shut behind her, and so he focuses his attention on his bleeding hand, wincing when he tries to close it into a fist. He rinses it in the sink, washing the gash with soap, and it hurts, hurts like hell, but he’s too numb to truly feel the pain. His body can’t process pain, anymore; it’s all he’s known for so long that it’s simply become his resting state, so much so that anything else feels foreign. He thought he’d been getting better, leaving behind that dark place in his mind, the part of him that longed for death.

But now he wants to die all over again. She’s made him want to die.

The cut is deep, but probably not deep enough to need stitches, and so he finds a washcloth, wrapping it tightly around the wound, applying pressure as best he can. It’s only then that he stumbles his way into the bedroom after her, and again Laurel is a black, shapeless form, this time lying on the bed, curled up away from him. He can tell by the cadence of her breathing, and the soft sounds she emits now and then, that she’s crying, sobbing silently into the night.

She hurt him. She didn’t mean to. Didn’t really want to. He knows that. He doesn’t know what part of her spurred those awful words, those things she’d said to him; he’s never seen her like that, wild-eyed, features contorted into something almost demonic. She’d gone at him like an animal, but if she wanted him dead, truly wanted him dead, she would’ve done it, taken that knife and plunged it past his ribcage while she had the chance.

And she didn’t. Could’ve.

Didn’t.

His footsteps are silent. He sinks down onto the bed, and when she feels the mattress give beneath him Laurel tenses, curls in just a bit further, retreating into herself back as far as she can go, as if afraid he’ll hurt her back – and he won’t. He never will.

He always does anyway, though. Hurts her. Even if he tries not to.

“I…” she chokes out, hiccupping. “I-I feel like I’m losing my mind.”

She sounds so small now, lost and scared, and he’s scared for her, almost as much as he’s scared _of_ her. Something is wrong. Something deeper than grief, than loss, than mourning; she feels like she’s losing her mind, losing her grip on reality, and he doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t ever know what to do.

So he sits there, sits up with her silently until dawn. It’s all he feels capable of doing.

 

~

 

There’s the day she finally comes to him.

It’s not long after that night. That night is all it takes for them to realize something is wrong, gravely wrong, though Frank doesn’t know how to address it, is too much of a coward to broach the subject, because the proverbial boat he’s standing in with her is very, very shaky and he’s petrified of rocking it. For the most part they seem to sweep it under the rug, bury it deep where no one will ever find it; no one knows, no one ever has to. No one had seen except the four walls around them, and their unspoken understanding is to keep it that way. But it can’t go unmentioned forever, and Laurel knows that, and so she comes to him one night as he’s lying on the couch, trying to force himself to sleep but not having much luck.

She’s huddled in a blanket, draped around her shoulders like a shawl, and she crouches down silently, sitting cross-legged on the floor beside him. The fabric pools around her, and she meets his eyes, peering over at him timidly, guiltily. She’s moonlit and stunning, and he sits up when she comes near, propping the pillow up behind his head.

“Hey.”

“Hi,” she greets and lowers her eyes. That’s all she says for a while, until she lassos a breath and ropes it into her lungs. “I just… I wanted to say I’m sorry. I never did.” She pauses. A crooked grin makes its way onto her features. “That’s all I ever seem to say, anymore.”

He doesn’t answer. Truth be told, he doesn’t really know what to say, what there _is_ to say. After a moment, Laurel shifts, pulling her cocoon a bit tighter around her.

“I’m turning into her,” she says, finally. “My mother. I have it too.”

It. He knows what _it_ is. He knows her mother has struggled with bipolar all her life, has listened to Laurel recount the stories of her episodes, both bad and good, how she all but grew up in a psych ward with her from the start, brought up in a world of sterile, solitary madness, a world no child should have to know so young. Her playmates had been nurses, her rattles pill bottles, her friends nonexistent, for the most part. The thought had crossed his mind, not often, but once or twice. He’d never seriously considered it as a possibility.

Or maybe he’d known, all along. Lied to himself as much as she had.

“I always knew I’d get it,” Laurel tells him, blinking, rubbing at her eyes, but she isn’t crying. She doesn’t seem to have any more tears. “It can be genetic. I was just… hoping it’d skip me. But deep down, I think I always knew I would.”

“Laurel…”

“I tried to tell myself it wasn’t, but everything I’m feeling, everything I’m doing…” She raises her eyes to the ceiling as if to keep tears from falling, but when she opens her mouth it’s a laugh that comes out, not a sob. “I’m just like her.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do. I have all the signs. The mania. Depression. I don’t think it’s as bad as hers; she had delusions, hallucinations. Or maybe I don’t have those yet, and it’ll just get worse. I’ll go crazy.” Another sputtered, watery laugh. “I already am. I guess I always was. It was always… in me, all this time.”

“You’re not crazy,” he soothes, because she’s not. She’s not crazy, not some disorder, some disease. She’s just Laurel.

Laurel ignores him, lowering her eyes and picking at her fingers. “She got diagnosed when I was thirteen. She explained it to me as… mountains and valleys. Cliché fucking metaphor, I know. But it made it easier to understand then. The mountains were the best, like your best day times a million. Like you could do anything. And the lows…” She gulps. “You feel like you’re drowning. That’s what she told me it feels like: drowning. Drowning in everything around you. I get what she meant, now.”

“Mountains and valleys, huh?” he echoes lowly, and Laurel scoots a bit closer, reaches out, taking his hand and tracing the scab there with a strange sort of fascination, that place she’d wounded him, that mark of her madness. It’s reminiscent of stigmata, in a way. He half-wants to laugh.

Like he’s Christ on a fucking cross, and she’s drilled the nails into his palms.

“Mountains and valleys,” she repeats, giving him an affirmative nod. A simple, childish metaphor, but an apt one.

“What next?”

“Doctors. Pills. Lots of those, until… I’m not me, anymore. Well – even less me than I am now.” Laurel presses her lips into a grave line, still not releasing his hand. She seems to need to hold it right now, to steady herself as she speaks these words. “Just promise me something.”

“Anything.”

“No matter how bad it gets… don’t let them send me to a psych ward,” she murmurs, voice thick, morose, grieving the loss of something she’s yet to lose. She meets his eyes, and he’s only ever seen Laurel look genuinely terrified a handful of times, but she’s terrified, right then. Positively scared out of her wits. “Please.”

“That’s not-” His voice gives out, simply ceases to work for a moment. “That’s not gonna happen. It’s not gonna come to that.”

“You don’t know that. You don’t… you don’t know what it’s like. It’s not pretty, Frank.” She swallows. “My dad left my mom because of hers. You should leave too. Before it gets ugly.”

“I’m not leavin’ you. Ever,” he says, more forcefully than he means to, but the thought horrifies him, and more than anything it bewilders him, to think that he would ever voluntarily be anywhere other than here with her. He slides off the couch, settles himself down onto the floor next to her; it doesn’t feel right to be above her, to have her kneeling before him. If anything, _he_ should be kneeling before _her_. “We’re in this together. We’re gonna… we’re gonna fight this, together.”

Exhaustion passes over her; he can sense it. Sense how tired the word _fight_ makes her, as soon as it meets her ears.

“I don’t wanna fight anymore,” she mutters, and he reaches out, taking her hand in his again. “It feels like I never stop.”

“I know.”

“Don’t you get tired of it?” Laurel asks, releasing the word on a sigh. “Fighting?”

“Yeah,” he says, because he does, and he is. He is tired, and it’s not some passing state, not something he can sleep off, awake fresh after. It’s ingrained in his soul, permanently; he’s a tired person, goddamn exhausted of the world and everyone in it, and sometimes the reality of her existence is all that truly sustains him, the only reason he rises in the morning. He has demons in his mind, too; different than hers in many ways, perhaps quieter, but still very much there. “I do.”

“Then why keep going? Why not just… just end it?”

He could have ended it. He came damn close and she knows that. Sometimes he wonders what it would’ve been like if he had, if he’d put that bullet in his brain, let the world go on without him in it, because his death wouldn’t have stopped it from spinning, wouldn’t have changed even so much as the direction of the breeze outside. He still thinks about doing it, sometimes, but the thoughts never linger long.

She means too much. He lives for her, and now…

Now, somehow, he has to get her to live for him.

“I don’t know,” he lies, though he does, though he’s staring the reason right in her face. “But this isn’t the end, okay? I know it. We been through so much shit already…” He manages a cautious, feeble grin. “What’s one more bump in the road?”

“It’s not gonna beat me. I’m not… I’m not gonna let it be all I am,” she asserts, forcefully, with sudden, focused fire behind her eyes, such will and determination. “My mother let it win. She let it control her. I won’t.”

“’Course you won’t,” he murmurs, and raises her hand to his lips, pressing a kiss to it as has become his custom as of late. He knows she won’t. There’s not a flicker of doubt in his mind that she won’t. She’s beautiful, and she’s strong, and she’s everything in the world, and she _won’t_.

Mountains and valleys. He doesn’t know what’s coming. He doesn’t have the faintest goddamn clue what’s going to become of them, of him, of her. But mountains and valleys – he can think of it like that.

They can navigate them, together.


	2. Part II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Second part! I'd love if y'all could leave me a comment/kudo to let me know you're reading and enjoying ;) Feed me (and enjoy).

There are good days.

They go to a doctor, a psychiatrist; a whole parade of them over the course of a number of weeks. Just as she’d said they would, they give her meds, a rainbow of brightly colored pills, all with long, confusing, mildly terrifying names, but Frank takes the time to carefully memorize her dosage, how often she takes each one, the side effects. They seem to level her, most days – but most days she tells him they make her feel nothing at all, like they’ve leeched all the color out of her world and now everything is one uniform, flat shade of grey. Most days she can’t decide if that’s better or worse.

It’s trial and error, they say. Adjusting the dosages. Figuring shit out. Tedious, but ultimately necessary. Things will get better. They must.

And there are days when it seems like they are.

It’s a sunny afternoon, in the week after her finals but before her internship begins; a much-needed break, for her. She’s made it through the semester though at times it’d seemed like it was going to break her, slogged her way out and fought tooth and nail and arrived at this place now, which might almost be construed as some terminus, some higher ground. Something better.

Maybe, maybe, almost _good_.

He opens a bottle of champagne and they drink it together, and he starts lunch after, chatting happily with her for a while about mindless, boring, humdrum things – but he’s more than happy to take mindless, take as much boring as the world feels like giving him. He leaves his sauce to simmer on the stove for a while and walks over where she stands idly by the windows in the living room, golden rays streaming through the glass panes, pouring over her. She’s glowing, shimmering with an almost otherworldly outline, her pores absorbing the sunlight and redirecting it ten times as brightly in all directions, light on her feet in a way he’s never seen before, and he makes a joke, doesn’t even know what it is, something stupid, something just for the sake of talking, in the hopes of maybe getting a low chuckle or an eyeroll out of her – and instead, she laughs. Really, truly, honest to God laughs, deep in her belly, long and hard and genuine.

He hasn’t heard her laugh like that in so long.

“Dance with me,” she declares abruptly, and takes his hand, tugging him over towards her. He has no choice but to go – not that he’d make any other choice, that is.

She looks ridiculous, doing a little jig with no music, swaying from side to side and making all sorts of sloppy, haphazard patterns and movements with her bare feet on the carpet, and he can’t help but laugh along with her, let her lace their hands together, his other coming up to rest on the small of her back. She’s tipsy, he can tell, but a significant part of this happiness, this pure glee _isn’t_ from the champagne, and he doesn’t know where it’s from.

But if he’s being completely honest, he doesn’t care much to bother contemplating the origins of it, in this moment in time.

“Don’t have any music,” he murmurs, and she shrugs, entirely unbothered by the fact, forcing him to spin her with a grand flourish.

“So?”

Frank chuckles, as she sews both her hands in with both of his, dancing like a child, no grace or planning, just purposely silly movements with the biggest, dumbest grin on her face he’s ever seen. She’s in jeans and a t-shirt, face bare of makeup, lip bitten, laughter lines patterning her face. He thinks she’s never looked so gorgeous. He _knows_ he’s never loved her more.

“Guess you got a point,” he concedes, and moves with her, not much, but enough to keep her close, play along. He raises an eyebrow. “These dance moves, though… not so sure about those.”

She scoffs. “I know, I know. I’m Latina, I should be a good dancer. Of course _that_ had to be the gene that skipped me.”

Frank smiles, and after a moment Laurel ceases her movements, lets him draw her against him in a slow, swaying dance once more, pressing his forehead to hers with a grin. “You gonna step on my feet or what?”

“Most definitely,” she quips, licking her lips and cocking her head to one side. “You gonna care?”

“Nah. My feet can take it,” he says, and kisses her.

And once he starts, he can’t seem to stop. He kisses her even as they move together, swaying and rocking like two fools, and after a while it becomes less like actual kissing and more like laughing with their lips brushing, now and then. Their laughter fills the room, fills it until it’s full to bursting, and she fills him with her laughter until _he’s_ full to bursting, pushing out everything else, all that pain, doubt, hurt, replacing it with love. Beating back his shadows into their dark corners with her light.

He can’t stop wondering how he got here. How he ended up in the middle of this beautiful dream.

“I love you,” she tells him, smiling, radiant as a sunbeam and twice as warm in his arms.

She’s said those words before – not often, but a number of times – but they stop his heart right then just as they had that first time, and before Frank can think of what to say back he kisses them off her tongue, swallows that breath of air down with them on it, holds them inside his chest where they can never leave, as if he can keep them alive forever. He’s so in love with her, so in love he long ago gave up trying to comprehend the immensity of it; it’d be like measuring the vastness of the universe, all those stars and planets and galaxies and nebulas, all that incalculable distance not even the most brilliant astronomers can chart. Sometimes he thinks that’s all he exists to do, anymore: love her. Kiss her.

So he does it again. It’s all he exists to do, after all.

“I love you too.”

It’s possible this is a high. A mountain. Probable, really. It’s too good to last, too good to be true, and Frank hates that shadow that hangs over them now even during the best of times, like this; that demon they can never exorcise, that sense of imminent doom. Fuck it. Fuck all of it.

He’s going to live in this moment while it lasts. He’s going to love her until he dies. 

 

~

 

There are days shadows are all they can see.

He’s right about the mountains being fleeting; they are, and that one doesn’t last, and inevitably they come crashing and burning back to the ground, taking a million steps back after only just taking the tiniest one forward. At some point, Laurel flushes her meds like he probably should have anticipated she would, fed up with the constant adjustments of her dosage they can never seem to get right, the side effects, the god awful _not feeling_ which she tells him is so much worse than any kind of feeling could ever be.

They get into a fight; a bad one. Very, very bad. Screaming and yelling loud enough he’s afraid the neighbors will call the cops on them. She doesn’t touch the knives – but he thinks the things they say to each other are just as cutting as any knife could ever be. Maybe even more.

It’s everything, all the shit in their past, Lila and Mahoney and Bonnie’s dad and his leaving, and even things before that. It all comes seeping to the surface like pus from a festering wound, and she throws it in his face, and she’s awful about it, though he thinks that’s probably deserved. He doesn’t yell back, at first; he never does. He stands there and takes it, exposing his back for her lashes and accepting each one as they come. And then she starts talking about it, again; about dying, about how she wishes she were dead, how he should just commit her to a psych ward like her father did to her mother and leave her there because he’s bound to do it one of these days anyway. About how much better it would be, for both of them, if they were dead.

He loses it. He’s not even sure why.

One moment he’s across the room, and the next he’s standing before her, and he’s grabbed ahold of her arm, shaking her lightly, and he’s _yelling_ , yelling about how she’ll have to kill him first if she wants to die because he won’t fucking watch her do it, because he _can’t_ fucking watch her do it, because he wouldn’t survive that, because it would kill him in a way worse than any death could ever be. Because he doesn’t know how to help her and he never has, and yeah, maybe it should’ve fucking been him who died after all. Because she was right about that.

Because she’s always right. Because he’s going to die now anyway. Because their combined madness is going to consume them.

Because it’s already begun to.

The words feel foul, bottled up inside him, in his throat, rotting through his flesh, and they stun Laurel into stillness. All the rage leaves her, and after the red haze clouding his vision clears he takes a look at her, sees she’s gone rigid as a statue, tearful eyes glistening in the darkness, shocked into stillness. He’s never yelled like that, _ever_ – not even when they’d fought before, not even the night he told her about Lila. He doesn’t yell. Yelling isn’t something he _does_.

But he yells at her, and he grabs her, and he’s sure he hurts her, and suddenly all that familiar self-loathing rises up inside him, hits him like a kick in the gut.

Nausea is slithering around his innards like a serpent, and he storms out, into the living room, hands balled into fists at his sides. He feels hopeless, furious; disgusted with himself, and stupid, most of all. Stupid for hoping things could ever get better, stupid for believing they can have good things, now, after everything; some fucking fantasy of a better tomorrow, a better life. He wants to put his fist through the drywall, really damn bad, but he also doesn’t, and _God_ , he doesn’t want to scare her. He’s already done more than enough damage tonight, so he settles on resting his fist and elbow and forehead against it instead, slumping forward, unable to stand on his own any longer.

Then – a pair of arms, snaking their way around his middle from behind.

Her arms.

Suddenly she’s there, pressing herself against him, resting her face on his back, nuzzling him with her nose and pressing a soft kiss to his spine. There’s no anger in her, now; he must’ve leeched it all out of her, stolen it for himself, and he startles at the touch, sucks in a breath, inexplicably tries to pull away. It’s possible that he’s crying, chest heaving with silent sobs; more than likely. She should hate him, throw him out like she should’ve done months ago, because all he’s ever done is hurt her, and he’s made her cry too. He’s made her cry so much.

He’s abruptly aware of how fragile she feels behind him, her thin little arms, her petite body. He could break her so easily – yet she always seems to be the one doing the breaking.

“We can’t-” he chokes out, shaking his head. He still won’t turn and face her; he doesn’t think he can, and he doesn’t want to see her, not knowing that he’s hurt her, that he’s almost certainly bruised her. He’s killed, taken lives with his hands. Yet somehow nothing has ever made him feel like more of a monster. “We can’t keep doin’ this, Laurel, we’re…” His voice breaks, faulty, useless thing that it is. “We’re killin’ each other.”

“I just… I want to be better,” she murmurs, voice muffled. “I’m trying, I-”

She thinks this was her fault, what he did, why he blew up, and it wasn’t; it was him, all him. Of course she’s trying. She’s fighting harder than he’s ever had to fight in his life, and she wasn’t screaming those things because she meant them; somewhere along the line, all the lines became hopelessly blurred, and he forgot that. Frank doesn’t know what to say, and before he knows it he’s turning around, pulling her into his arms and surrounding her with them, pressing frantic kisses to every inch of exposed skin; her forehead, cheeks, nose, neck.

“Fuck, I’m sorry,” he breathes, hauling in a ragged breath. “I’m so sorry.”

“Hey,” she says, and looks up at him, giving an extremely out-of-place, watery laugh. “That’s my line.”

She’s laughing. It takes a moment for the fact to register, and when it does, Frank finds himself chuckling back, chuckling like a lunatic, dark laughter bubbling up inside his chest. Of course she would be able to find the humor in this madness, the comedy in it all. He’s not sure she’d still be alive if she couldn’t.

“Am I, uh… I allowed to say it again, then?” he asks. Suddenly the tears on his cheeks feel nonexistent, evaporated by the warmth of her laughter. “Apologize for stealin’ your line?”

“Let’s just…” she drifts off, abruptly serious. “Let’s just stop saying sorry at all, okay?”

Stop saying sorry. Stop apologizing for hurting each other. Really, what she means is stop hurting each other at all. Stop _needing_ to say they’re sorry. He can sure as shit try; he knows it’ll be a hell of a lot harder for her, when sometimes she doesn’t feel in control of her own body, her words, her actions and thoughts, plagued by those shadows only she can see. When some days she's a stranger not only to him, but to herself.

All that doesn’t matter. It’s not the sum total of who she is. And this isn’t a battle he can fight for her. He can’t rescue her. Can’t make things better. Can’t make it all go away.

This isn’t a battle he can fight for her. But he can fight _with_ her. And he will, even if it’s hard, even if something like this happens again – which he’s certain it will, because it always does. Even it damn near kills him. He’s here to stand his ground.

He’s with her, in this.

 

~

 

There are days he doesn’t know how to classify.

Not everything needs classification, though, Frank comes to realize in time. Not everything she does, her every action, every word, every behavior, as some symptom with some clinical definition. He thinks most of it’s bullshit which doesn’t serve a purpose, which could only ever serve to make Laurel feel like some sort of malfunctioning brain instead of a whole, complete human being. There are things he can recognize easily in her, now: when her episodes are beginning, when she’s jittery and manic and unable to sit still, when the first few layers of that dark cloud are descending on her and she’s receding back into herself like a tide into the sea. Those he can classify. Those he understands.

But most other things he just experiences. Like when she doesn’t talk to him for hours; not because she’s snubbing him, but because she actually physically _can’t_ , because she’s too lost in her own mind to do so. Like when she yells, becomes irrationally angry, lashes out for no reason. He takes it all in stride, doesn’t trace the things she does back to any particular root cause. Doesn’t classify them.

They’re just her. Just a part of her. They’re things that just happen, now, from time to time.

He comes upon her in the shower one afternoon, and he can tell just by looking at her it’s one of her grey, in-between days; a day she’s not quite high or low, but far from okay, either. A day that feels a little like suspended animation, she’s told him, like she’s sitting around waiting for herself to drop down to a valley or shoot up to the peak of a mountain because she can sense something coming, petrified to find out which it will be.

She’s naked, sitting with her back pressed up against the tile wall, knees drawn up to her chest, and he can’t be sure how long she’s been in here, but he thinks it’s probably been a while. Her eyes are empty, dull pits, all the life drawn out of them. Her hair is damp and dripping around her shoulders, body situated just beyond the reach of the spray, and she looks so distant, a thousand light years away, even though there’s only the glass shower door between them.

She does this, at times. Disassociates. Detaches from reality and unplugs her mind from her body to escape the pain, going internal, retreating somewhere inside herself he can’t follow. It’d used to catch him off guard, make him worry, but now he can recognize it, knows it’s largely harmless.

Still, his first instinct is to glance around, check to see if there are any pill bottles resting nearby, any sign she’s tried something, but he can’t see any, and although Frank knows her thoughts are dark and her words often indicate otherwise, she’s never really demonstrated any sustained determination to kill herself. She talks about it, and a few times she’s come close, but she doesn’t really want to, and he knows that, and so he slides back the shower door, standing over her with worry in his eyes when she doesn’t so much as glance up at him.

“Hey.”

The single syllable makes her flinch, and finally she looks up at him, something like recognition seeping into those eyes of hers; that blue which seems, somehow, to change its shade from day to day, now. Today it’s markedly dimmer, more of the grey in her irises shining through, almost like a mood ring – though Frank knows it’s probably an optical illusion, a trick of the light. Eyes can’t really change their color. It’s impossible.

But she’s always been an impossible girl. So maybe it is possible after all.

“Hi.”

She doesn’t show any intent to move, or say anything more. After a moment, Frank kicks off his socks and shoes, nodding down at the space beside her with a grin, as if there’s nothing peculiar about this at all. “Mind if I join?”

If she were entirely present in that instant, Laurel would probably look at him like he was nuts, but instead she just nods disinterestedly, and scoots over. He sinks down at her side, not bothering to turn off the shower, letting the water soak through his suit and slacks and not giving even the most remote echo of a fuck about it; he stopped caring about vanities a long time ago. Laurel seems to need the water, that repetitive beating of the tiny droplets against her skin, to deaden her senses, to insulate her in her own head. Or maybe to moor her. To keep her from drifting out of the atmosphere completely.

Whatever the reason, he leaves the shower running, and they sit there in silence until he’s as wet as she is, face and beard dripping. It’s only after some time has passed that Laurel finally returns to herself, albeit in a very limited capacity, and glances over at him.

“You’re soaking wet,” she observes, and he shrugs, acknowledging the fact with only dim interest.

“Little water never killed nobody.”

“It’s gonna kill that suit.”

“I can buy another one.”

Silence, for a moment. Frank is convinced there’s no sound in the universe except the spray of water pattering against the floor; lukewarm now, and quickly growing colder. Finally, Laurel sighs, eyes slipping out of focus.

“I’m not even going for happy at this point, y’know,” she mutters. “I just want to… not feel like this.”

He takes her hand; steady, sure. He’s taken to holding it all the time now, at every opportunity. “We’ll get there.”

“Why do you stay?” Laurel asks suddenly, the question so pointed it takes him aback. Why does he stay, stay with her. Put up with all this. Do the things he does – when he could leave her, find someone else, and surely it would be so much easier. “Why’re… why’re you still here?”

The answer is simple. It’s always been simple.

“’Cause I love you.”

She scoffs. “That’s not a good enough reason.”

Frank raises her hand to his lips, pressing a kiss to her fingers. “It is for me.”

“You’re not afraid I’m contagious?” she asks. “That I’ll make you crazy too?”

He knows why she’s asking, knows that was part of the reason her father left her mother, in the end; because he was afraid being around her long enough could somehow transmit the illness to him. Because he was afraid he’d catch it from her if he stayed too long in her world, that he would wade too deep into her madness and it would ensnare them both.

Frank smirks. “I been crazy for a long time.”

“Not like me,” Laurel says, voice low, mournful. “Not like… this.”

“Maybe not,” he concedes, and kisses her hand again, feeling her delicate, tapered fingers in his. “But we’re all our own unique kinda crazy, at this point.”

“I wanna be who I was,” she laments, eyes wide. She looks to be on the verge of tears, suddenly. “When you met me. I was… so different, then.”

“I don’t need that.” He shakes his head, unflinching, a sort of unshakable conviction in his every movement. He’s telling her the truth; he doesn’t need that, the way things were before – simple but really not simple at all. There’s no point mourning those people they can never be again, those bodies they’ve buried six feet under. They were characters, then; they feel much more real, now. “Just need you now.”

She smiles, and it looks more like a grimace than anything, really, but he knows what the intention is, and he can tell she’s trying. She’s trying so hard. “Even if I make you crazy?”

“Even if you make me crazy,” he repeats, and smiles back.

After a moment, Laurel extricates her hand from his grip, making hers the dominant one instead and raising it, turning it over and over as if reading each crease in his palm, his life line, each bump and line and cell of his skin. She’s developed a fascination with hands, lately; touching his, holding his, tactile and curious as a child. She seems to be endlessly searching for ways to ground herself to earth, to him, when so often her hold on reality is tenuous at best, and he doesn’t mind.

He’s more than happy to let her hold his hand.

She kisses his knuckles, each and every one, then the inside of his wrist, palm, fingers and fingertips, and finally once she’s done she meets his eyes, and all at once she’s back with him, present once more in her body, bright with consciousness. She’s still in pain, the kind of pain she can’t escape, pain in her mind; he can tell it’s a bad day, not really in-between at all. But more than anything it’s just a _day_ – not good or bad. It doesn’t necessitate a label. He doesn’t always need to give it one.

It’s just another day, and they’re still standing. And she’s with him.

And that’s enough for him. That’ll be enough for him forever.

Frank helps her up, after a few more minutes, and dries the both of them off. She’s nude, shuddering from the cold when he helps her into bed, and he crawls beneath the covers with her, peppering light kisses across her forehead, face, nose, chin, everywhere he can reach, but never on her lips. He’s naked too, not because they’re going to fuck, not because he wants to – because he just wants to _feel_ her; the fluttering of her pulse, the steady drum of her heart, the pull of each breath she takes, the twinge of her muscles beneath her skin. He presses close, closer. He wants to fade into her, let their limbs and bodies and souls fuse, join together until there’s no sign of the people they once were, those two broken, lonesome creatures. But that isn’t possible, and he can’t, and so Frank settles for kissing her instead, holding her close until she sleeps.

It doesn’t feel like settling, though. Not at all.

 

~

 

There are the days after.

And he doesn’t mean after she gets better, after she’s suddenly, miraculously cured. This isn’t something that will ever go away; it’s a fight Laurel continues to fight every waking moment of her existence, one he can do nothing but remain with her for, help her when he can, offer her his meager presence, if nothing else.

He means after he stops classifying the days altogether; as good or bad or somewhere in between, black or white or varying shades of grey. After he stops packing the hours and minutes and weeks into neat little labeled boxes and setting them on designated shelves.

After he stops defining her days, and starts living them.

It’s late morning, early summer; still with a faint spring chill in the air, but later Frank can tell it will be warmer, much warmer, and soon with no chill at all. A thousand caps sail into the air like a flock of crows, silk tassels flapping in the wind, appearing almost to be suspended there for a moment in the breeze before tumbling back down in droves. Applause washes over the audience, catching from person to person. The ceremony draws to a close, and the crowd disperses, scattering across the grass, loved ones flocking to loved ones, running and hugging and kissing each other. Frank wades his way through the throng of people slowly, not in any particular rush or panic to find her.

He knows he will, sooner or later, one way or another. He always does. She’s his compass, his north, south. His east and west. She’s his everything.

And then, like a vision through the crowd, there she is.

Her oversized gown swallows her up in the most charming way, black adorned with purple panels, and she beams when her eyes fall upon him, eyes a clear, luminous blue, a slow smile folding itself out onto her lips. She’s speaking with Michaela and Connor, and excuses herself when he comes into view, hands behind his back, almost a bit sheepish, not wanting to intrude – even though he knows she won’t think of it that way, that she’d never regard him as an annoyance. His heart sings with pride just looking at her in all her regalia, diploma clutched in one hand, scampering towards him across the grass.

She’s so beautiful. She’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.

“Hey,” he greets as she comes closer, unable to stop his smile from widening, widening until it feels like it might split his face in half, and she smiles back, but that word – _smile_ – doesn’t seem to be enough for the look she gives him. For a moment it’s almost as though she becomes the sun itself, like all the energy and light on earth is born from her body instead, right then.

“Hey,” she breathes, and raises herself onto her tiptoes, kissing him deeply.

Frank almost can’t move, he’s so awed by her, struck by lightning and frozen stiff. He can’t speak. Can’t even really breathe. He lost the ability to do either of those things around her ages ago and still has never quite remembered how, and he doesn’t want to, doesn’t _need_ to. All he needs is to be here, basking in her gaze as if in the sun, warming him from head to toe and making a dull, sweet ache solidify like a rock beneath his breastbone. She looks so happy, happier than he’s seen her in so long.

She may not have been going for happy. But happy is what she got, in the end.

“I’m proud of you,” he murmurs against her lips, because he is. So much. He feels full to bursting with it; she’s been through hell, all nine circles of it a million times over, and here she is, walking out on the other side with her head held high, forged from the flames – not destroyed by them.

The flames can’t touch her now. Can’t touch either of them.

Laurel blushes. “Stop it.”

“I’m not gonna stop. I’m so proud of you,” he teases and pecks her on the lips again. “You’re amazing, you know that?”

“Mmm,” she hums, quirking an eyebrow. “Yes, and I now have a _very_ fancy, _very_ amazing piece of paper to commemorate these last three years of hell.”

“It’s more ‘n that,” he undertones, brushing his lips across her nose, laying a kiss on the tip of it. “And I’m still proud of you.”

She’s right; these last three years _have_ been absolute hell. Those first few months after her diagnosis were hell, especially. Really that whole first year was, filled with near-constant visits to the doctor, an ever-spinning roulette wheel of medications and mood stabilizers and shifting dosages and things that didn’t work until they finally found a balance of things that did. There’d been so many times she’d contemplated dropping out, leaving school, telling him there was no point anymore, that she was already failing everything and she’d be a failure of a lawyer too.

She’d never given in – not even in her darkest hours. And as proud as he is for this, for all the pomp and circumstance of today, he’s infinitely prouder of her for that.

And things haven’t been easy, and Frank knows the fact of the matter is that they won’t be, ever. Things are better, now, and they’re more whole, more complete than they’ve ever been, settling into this softer, gentler love together, but this isn’t a fight Laurel ever stops fighting, one she can ever truly win, or one he can fight for her. One he can save her from. She doesn’t need to be saved. Didn’t then, and doesn’t now. And he _didn’t_ save her.

She saved herself. He just happened to be there.

Frank looks at her, looks into her eyes, all that brightness, that blue adoration, and he can see this is a good day – or what would’ve been a good day, once, back when he was still designating them as such. He doesn’t think of their days together like that, anymore. He doesn’t need to.

This isn’t a good day. Nor is it a bad day.

This is just a day. And the days like this are the ones that count.

**Author's Note:**

> [Come find me on tumblr!](http://laurelcasfillo.tumblr.com/)


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